This past Friday, I entered the craze at my local mall and obviously noticed sale, after sale, after sale. There’s nothing new about Black Friday and Cyber Monday being two of the biggest shopping days of the year. But what has changed? The way we find our coupons! In preparation for these big days, I wasn’t looking at ads in the paper, flyers, or even online. Instead, I downloaded a few news apps on my iPhone. (At this moment, I think I realized that I will never be able to not have an iPhone. Welcome to 2012!) So anyways, to find the deals that I wanted to score, I turned to the RetailMeNot, Groupon, and Coupon Clipper apps. I, of course, also had to check in every destination on Foursquare.

Side note: If you aren’t sure what some of these are, check out Katy’s post about RetailMeNot here, and Brittni’s guide to using Foursquare here!

A lot of the population would say that Black Friday shopping is a great time to start or finish their holiday shopping. As for me, all of my purchases are usually for me… Hopefully that doesn’t sound too selfish! Guilty, as charged. But a girl has to pay the bills, right? And the deals are so enticing! So anyways, as I browsing H&M, I found a cute red bag that I just needed to buy. Standing in line for about fifteen minutes allowed me to check the store for discounts on my RetailMeNot app. No luck for in-store coupons. On Coupon Clipper, I had no luck even searching for the store (and I’m not exactly sure if it was the app or the user. ;)). And Groupon? Nada.

As I got closer and closer to the front of the line, I did a quick Google search coupons at H&M. Low and behold, I came across a coupon for 20% off of one item if you signed up for their newsletter. Hey, it was worth the shot! I hurried and type in my information, and just like that — I got the coupon and received 20% off of my purchase! The purse, originally $25, was now mine for $20. For a college girl, a five dollar saving is superb!!

So what’s the deal? I downloaded these apps for smart shopping, and had better luck just googling deals. Twenty-somethings… chime in! What saving sources are you personally using? Do you have a favorite app? Or do you just rely on Google?